Ron Howard Attaches His Name To J.J. Abrams' All I've Got

Ron Howard has to be one of our most quietly prolific directors, mixing up genres and delivering a steady stream of features with the precision of a clock. Sometimes the miss (like The Dilemma), but Howard has more than enough hits under his belt to outweigh the risky chances he’ll take. As he puts the finishing touches on his Formula-1 racing drama, Rush, and polishes up his Jay-Z documentary – You see? Prolific! – Howard has attached his name to a new project with a flashy backer.

The Da Vinci Code director reportedly wants to film Kol Ma She'Yesh Li, a remake of a 2003 Israeli TV movie that Vulture says is being developed by J.J. Abrams’s Bad Robot and has been set up at Paramount Picture. The English translation, and likely title of the film, is All I’ve Got, and the story follows a woman named Tamara who survives a freak car accident that, sadly, claims the life of her boyfriend, Udi. Years later, after Tamara has re-married and raised a family with a new man, she passes away and moves on to the afterlife, where she is given a difficult choice: Forget her life, and return to the time before the accident, where she lived happily with Udi; or remain as she currently is and wait, patiently, for her husband and children to join her in paradise.

There’s a lot of potential to that story, and we can see why Howard would be attracted to that challenge. As I mentioned, he’s not afraid to transition between different genres. In fact, Howard’s directorial career is best characterized by our inability to pigeonhole him, as he has directed everything from breakneck literary adaptations (Angels & Demons) to period dramas (Cinderella Man, The Missing) and sci-fi thrillers (Apollo 13). There’s no word on when Howard might start piecing All I’ve Got together, but if he enters production in 2013, we’ll likely see it on screen next year.